Poker Face
by East-Coast-Invictus
Summary: Modern. Sequel to Some Things Never Change and Toxic. Some fun with cards. Barbossa gets back at Jack.


Jack Sparrow laughed.

The raucous noise brought the glaring eyes of those assembled from behind their cards up to fix upon the outsider at their card table. An undisguised resentment was reflected in each gaze. Any normal person would have been intimidated by the ring of thugs, criminals, and generally shifty people, but Jack Sparrow was not normal. He was not quite a person either, having given up his humanity some four hundred years ago.

But this crowd would not know it. Nor would they ever. The mysterious quality around the swaggering odd-ball irritated them to no end, but no matter what they did, he never seemed to be discouraged. And this irritated them even further.

Jack, going by the name Jonathan Swift nowadays, smiled smugly to himself, rearranged his cards, and ostentatiously slid forward his entire pile of chips.

This brought the collective stare of hatred to the pile as Jack sat back, baring his teeth in a wily grin dotted with gold. "All in," he said on purpose, knowing full well the redundancy of the statement.

The weaker of the players, those completely baffled by Jack, did not want to risk what money they had. The man had a bad knack of collecting a little too often. Just last week he had cleaned almost everyone of them of about a hundred dollars. They folded before even seeing what Jack had in his hand.

Others, however, those ranking high in Gangland hierarchy, made the decision before sitting down that if Swift collected again like he had so many times before, then they were going to put a quick end to his 'lucky streak.'

One of them scoffed at the blatant show of arrogance and promptly pushed his own pile into the center of the table. A man in a leather jacket studded with metal eyed Jack a moment, mouth twisting sourly. "You're pretty bold, Swift, but this bluffing business ain't the thing to make people like ya," he said, shoving chips forward.

Jack shrugged. "What makes you think I'd want the likes o' you belligerent brutes t' like me?" he asked, appearing genuinely confused.

The man in the leather jacket sneered nastily. "Good. That saves me the trouble. How about we raise the stakes then?"

"Be my guest, mate."

Leather-Jacket and his neighbor shared a look and placed their guns on the table before them. Jack eyed the 9mms a moment before placing one of his rings down. The two thugs stared at him incredulously. Then it was their turn to laugh. Jack smiled, this time only turning up the corners of his mouth in a genial manner. "Shall we?" he queried.

"Yeah, okay," Leather-Jacket replied. He put down a flush of hearts led by an ace. His neighbor swore and put down a pair of threes, a jack, nine, and five. He had been hoping both Jack and Leather-Jacket were bluffing.

Jack merely grinned again and set his cards down. "Read 'em 'n weep, lads," he declared, gesturing to his royal flush with a flourish.

The room froze for a moment.

--

After more than four hundred years on the planet, Barbossa still did not like the cold. He had felt it in death one too many times. Yet, here he was, barely a week fresh from his thirteenth resurrection huddled before a barrel with a fire in it located approximately three miles from Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, New York.

It was one of the seedier parts of town where he could disappear for a while until his late, quasi-famous alias Honoré Barbary fell off the radar. And thank goodness that homelessness was not entirely rare, or he would be quite a sore thumb protruding from the hand of society.

But the cold he definitely still did not like. Typical of his karma to leave him resurrected barely halfway through winter in New York clad in only a morgue sheet. He had come across clothes since then but they weren't much.

Barbossa shuffled a little closer to the barrel, holding his hands with the palms facing the open flame. His face was a sour mask of petulance. If he only he had not overplayed his hand in the Jurgis case, if only that bloody Pollock had not been related to vengeful, overzealous butchers, if only… The list went on, and there was not much he could do about it now, but that did not mean he was not any less grouchy about it. He could be sitting his overly expensive flat enjoying a bloody mary and the pretended attentions of some attractive female.

He grumbled a few obscenities and settled his chin deeper into his raggedy, chartreuse scarf.

Some time passed, and nothing happened until, just as fat snow flakes began drifting down through the canopy of the skyscrapers from an inky night sky, a very familiar sound erupted from the building Barbossa and his barrel were up against. Barbossa blanched a moment because the sound was gunfire, and it happened to have been the last sound he heard before his most recent death.

He was in the midst of thinking it may be wise to move away when a door, hidden in the grime on the walls and consequently quite near to him, literally flew open, and a figure came barreling out following closely by flying bullets.

--

Leather-Jacket and his neighbor had not pulled their guns out to bet them, but to use in the even 'Jonathan Swift' bested them for the fifth time in a week in poker. And he did.

Jack dove for the door as Leather-Jacket snatched up his gun. Part of his mind utterly detached from the present reasoned that he had probably employed the extra card deck a little too much. This group had been particularly slow, and it led him into a false sense of security.

Bullets ricocheted around him, but, being Jack Sparrow, none of them actually hit him. He all but charged through the door and out into an alley. Escape would have been within his grasp had it not been for the unfortunate hobo stationed in front of the door. Jack, hobo, and burning barrel met with a crash and not a few yelps of surprise. Fire and ash spilled out onto the street. Some of the embers fell on Jack and the hobo but both were too preoccupied with scrambling away that the embers went by unnoticed.

The thugs came roaring out after Jack to find both the cheater and the unfortunate spectator already at the end of the alley. They fired at both of them, but to no avail. The retreating backs disappeared around the corner and were lost to the snow-laden night.

--

Neither man stopped for about five blocks, where they both coasted to a stop, breathing heavily in Jack's case but wheezing painfully in the other's. "Sorry about tha', mate," Jack began, turning to face the other man, "Didn't realize you were there."

The hobo, Barbossa, merely waved a hand at him, unable to speak as he leaned against the plastic shelter of a bus stop. While most of the wounds leftover from his death were gone, the one hole in his right lung persisted in being a bear. He had a feeling the morticians missed that particular piece of lead and that it still lay somewhere in his chest cavity.

Jack, unconcerned by the other man's wheezing, dug into a pocket to pull out a wad of bills recently collected in the recent poker games. "Some people just don't take well t' losing." He selected a tattered fifty and extended it to the hobo. "Take this but don't let word t' anyone tha' you've seen me, savvy?"

The hobo's eyes seemed to light up at the sight of the money. Barbossa was not about to kid himself; he was pretty desperate. However, the voice of the other man struck him as unpleasantly familiar.

Both men truly looked at each other, and both were struck dumb for a good minute.

There, bathed in the light of a street lamp and dressed rather well, stood Jack Sparrow.

There, leaning against a bus stop for support and looking like the homeless population's poster boy, stood Hector Barbossa.

Jack was the first to speak. "Hector!" he declared happily. But, poor Jack, seemed to have forgotten whom he was speaking to in the midst of the surprise.

Barbossa stepped forward suddenly and punched Jack square in the face. Jack hit the sidewalk hard, and the air was knocked out of him. As he lay there with the world spinning above him, Barbossa leaned over to pluck the fifty and whatever other money Jack had from his hands. "Nice t' see ye, Jack . Looks t' be ye've done well fer yerself of late," he observed, thumbing through the bills.

"You died," Jack grunted through a bloody nose, pointing at Barbossa. "Tha's a point fer me."

"Yeah, but I win this round." Barbossa bent down and patted Jack on the cheek, simultaneously returning a single ten to Jack's coat pocket. "That's fer shootin' me in the foot," he said, jabbing Jack on the chest with a finger. "See ye in the funny papers."

Barbossa headed off into the night.

Jack lay there for a moment, staring up into the glare of the street lamp, blissfully unaware of the white flakes gathering on his face.

Then he laughed.

--

AN: Dedicated to Ayn Rand and the first several hundred pages of The Fountainhead. Got me all fired up again to write something. Yay for more modern stuff!


End file.
